Three times in my life when I’ve needed money fast

I’ve always been pretty good with money, living within my means and budgeting and saving when I can. In good times and bad we’ve always had enough to pay the bills and keep a roof over our heads. It’s those pesky times when you’re hit by a big bill for something unexpected which knock you for six.

No matter how well you’re managing your money, having to dig deep and find £500 for a car repair bill, or a new washing machine is always going to mess up your budget for that month, and perhaps the following few months. Despite careful planning and budgeting, we have sometimes found ourselves in a financial pickle.

Here are the three times in our lives when we’ve needed money fast –

Unexpected and huge Vet bill

We inherited a wild and wonderful dog. She was young, bouncy and fearless. She also wasn’t insured. One of the first times we took her for a walk she had a freak accident and poked herself in her throat with a stick. A huge haematoma developed and she not only needed emergency treatment, she needed specialist emergency treatment. Several surgeries later she was better and we were £3k poorer.

We scrabbled around trying to find the money to pay the bill. We spent our savings, our family had a whip round and we budgeted extra hard for months afterwards (beans on toast for tea every night). It was tough and it took us a few years to get over the financial hit we took. The lesson? Always insure your pets.

New car after write off

When my husband was involved in a car accident and his first car was written off, we thought we would be ok because it was insured. It turns out we had undervalued his car (a nippy little Citroen Saxo which we loved) on the insurance forms, so instead of getting the £2k it was worth, we got half that and needed to find the difference and a little more for a new car.

I don’t drive, so we relied on his car for holidays, for shopping and getting us both to work. He used his car for work a lot too. Whilst we could manage for a few weeks solely on public transport, we needed a new car pretty quickly. Again we scrabbled around, dipped into savings and negotiated hard with used car salesman. We got our new car, it probably wasn’t the car we would have chosen if the circumstances were different, but it got us from A to B and took us on a few adventures over the years.

You can’t live without a fridge freezer can you?

White goods are a bit of a nightmare. They’re mostly essential and these days when they go wrong it’s usually cheaper to replace them than it is to repair them. Having said that, our trusty washing machine repairman has kept several of our washing machines limping along for a few extra years.

What we cannot live without, especially now we have a son is a fridge freezer. A few years ago we went away for a weekend and when we returned home we discovered that the fridge freezer had died and everything in it had defrosted. It was completely kaput. Although it was quick and easy to get online and find a replacement, finding the £350 to pay for it was a little trickier.

We’ve been lucky when it’s come to big bills. We’ve usually managed to get enough money together by digging into what savings we had and family have usually been happy to help out if we needed them to. Finding the money to pay an unexpected and big bill can be a nightmare, a short-term loan from a company such as Cash Lady could help to get you over the bump.

Big, unexpected bills are part of life, and whilst you can put money to one side to pay for them, sometimes that’s not enough.